Are space settlements in our future?

NASA has been undergoing quite a few changes recently. In the past few weeks, the agency awarded the Sierra Nevada Corporation, SpaceX and Boeing contracts to develop a craft to take astronauts into orbit in the next five years. This could mark a new era where private companies start taxi services taking people into space. But will these lead to large-scale space settlements? And if so, how would one of these settlements be designed? Chip Skambis reports on how those will require more infrastructure than what the current system will allow.

[audio:http://www.wuft.org/media/audio/NASARevisedMixdown.mp3]